Back to the Garden

So many perfect pictures of California landscapes make the rapturous assumption that none of us is here any longer. We were, however. We sluiced mountains into rivers to get at the gold, took down forests to build structures of wood and iron gone before our parents were born, erected groves of derricks over oil fields and wrested wheat harvests from dry land so disastrously there is no memory of it, save in some pictures.

A few faces of men in them, dirty and hard, stare out from a quarry, along a railroad cut, during a grape harvest and from a remote era when men actually worked, before still, timeless and anonymous views of a gorgeously depopulated California supplanted them and their black-and-white labor.

So many pictures of California landscapes are beautiful, but they aren’t true. Having walked a few feet away from our landscape, the photographers of “California: Land and Legacy” took deeply saturated images of boulders, groves, hillsides and coastlines that are detached from history--indeed, from any human context except from the luxury of gazing in the preferred direction. There’s a sizable divot in California’s dirt, where they stood with others and routinely turned and shot. As object lessons for us, their photographs are occasions of unearned nostalgia. Insufficiently literal and without any story attached, they illustrate only the pathos of California.

I am tired of my own sentimentality for a place whose landscape must be rendered either as a tender throat pulled back and exposed for the knife or as an open wound already. Pity is misplaced if there is no place in it for you or me.

“California: Land and Legacy” is a Conservation Fund book fronted by the Lane brothers. The Lane family for two generations published Sunset magazine, and they invented postwar California as a tasteful point of view, never bothering to picture--then or now--the possible sublimity of the last empty lot in a suburban subdivision.

A great and subtle process is underway in picturing the landscapes of California, something not any less a “jarring collision with nature” (in William Fulton’s honest phrase) than the original transformation of wild California into our home. Fulton, in the text that accompanies these too-perfect pictures, tells how ordinary men and women--and bureaucrats, Native American councils, farmers, federal scientists, state regulators and calculating men in boardrooms a continent away--have collided with the limits of California, so famously an island on the land. Knowledge of limits makes everything inside these borders precious and not just the exemplary parts that photograph well. The collisions that Californians have had with limits have struck off hundreds of efforts to husband all the landscape within them. Some are as charismatic as preservation of the Headwaters Forest on California’s North Coast. Some are as difficult to grasp as the CalFed water project’s process for changing the flow of billions of gallons of Sierra runoff in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Most are as parochial as the Natural Communities Conservation Planning programs on the fringes of suburban tracts in Carlsbad and Irvine.

Thousands of acres of landscape are being preserved, and very few of them aspire to awe. They are bluffs in Orange County, sloughs in Fresno and seasonal wetlands in the Central Valley. Californians are not preserving views any more but natural communities and, in the imperfect way that we have, making human communities too.

Economic downturns, the obstinacy of politics and the frailty of public-private conservation partnerships can derail the process of preservation. Ahead of us, the Anglo majority that was encouraged to see the California landscape as an aesthetic commodity will be transformed into a new cultural pluralism for which the Lane brothers and the media company that now owns Sunset magazine are uncertain guides.

I am aware of the costs of putting all kinds of people in the landscape--working people, immigrant people and people who will never read William Fulton’s short, brave essay--and of filling out these landscape views with all the colors of California. More of us need to be like Fulton and have a feeling for the stories in our landscape and aspire to the future of California.

What is clear from these stories is that farming, ranching, lumbering, mining and real estate speculation on a titanic scale and for 150 years have domesticated California, a process for which the epic beauty of the state’s natural landscape was both a roadside billboard and a concealing screen.

As the jarring collision between text and pictures inadvertently shows in “California: Land and Legacy,” California is less beautiful now and more our own. We’ve made our garden, and now we must cultivate it.